In the Dark
by panicandstartariot
Summary: Response to a kinkmeme prompt begging for a pregnant Chekov delivering in a "dire and incredibly painful, angst-filled circumstance". Somehow I also managed to whump Captain Kirk a bit. Warning for some graphic-ness.
1. Chapter 1

DISCLAIMER: If I owned Star Trek, you have no _idea_ the havoc that would've already been wreaked.

So this came out of a prompt from the kink meme, part eight, wherein one anon asked for this:

"_So basically I just want Chekov pregnant, forced to deliver in some dire and incredibly painful, angst-filled circumstance. Whether or not there is a plot or a genderbend of any sort is up to whoever writes it. I don't even care who he's paired with. That's how sick I am."_

So I, being of equal sickness and an unsound mind, produced this fic. I am going to a special hell. But gleefully.

In Jim Kirk's experience, people die fast. They don't linger, not for long, anyways; a quick blast of heat and energy and it's over. Sometimes it's worse, but generally, if you're alive long enough to really suffer you stand a chance of being rescued. You go down swinging or you don't go down at all.

This, Jim has determined, is interminable. Cruel. Wrong. There is something broken with the universe. This isn't how it goes. The boy sobs once more – dry, raspy throat making it more of a gasp than anything – and his fingers go limp in Jim's.

In the darkness he holds tighter to the weak hand. "No" he murmurs, for the hundredth or maybe the thousandth time. No, stop it, no; this isn't how it works, no, not here, no, not now.

"Pavel?" He mutters, and shifts as much as he can in the tiny space, pulling the body of his navigator closer. It's cold, so very cold, and he needs to be able to feel his fingers. The darkness has taken his sight; all he has left is the pervasive scent of coppery blood and dirt, the sounds of their harsh breathing, and his sense of touch. He's blind enough as it is in this situation.

The boy mumbles something in Russian, unintelligible and woven through with weariness.

"They're coming, Pavel. You hear me?" he says in little more than a whisper. He's maneuvered around to the far end of the cave – here the dirt is loose from the fall and his boots sink a few inches in – and he feels around for the landmarks of a body he's never seen the map to. Somewhere, Scotty is pacing, his nimble and dexterous fingers at a loss – combing through his hair, fiddling with pieces of machinery, twisting and turning, knotting the sheets of an empty bed. Jim, more than anything, wants those hands here instead of his own.

Pavel lets out a ragged shriek at the touch of chilly fingers – he's already torn and bleeding from the early onset. The hormones Bones has been dosing him with were supposed to make this a natural birth, simple, no more dangerous for a man than a woman, so long as he finished the full course of them. Or for a skinny eighteen-year-old ensign with a fluttering, brilliant smile and laughing brown eyes. It hurts Jim, even though he can see nothing in this pitch black. He knows that face is contorted in ways it should not be. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

He knows what he is supposed to do, roughly, from the two minutes of comm. range they had before that last wall of earth came sliding down atop them – Bones barked orders about what to do in an emergency, but most of them ended in "Just hold on, I'm coming to you." This is risky beyond belief, but there is no tremble to Jim's movements as he measures the dilation and feels hot blood seep across his wrist.

"Nyet, nyet-" the boy whimpers, and then clenches and screams as the next contraction hits him. Jim pulls his hand back, and hovers closely; he's afraid to touch the kid. This whole birth thing is where his experience and age fall through. Sometime in the last seven months Chekov and Scotty became the grown-ups here, the ones ready for a family, and Jim doesn't think he'll ever have that kind of steadiness. Even as this rail-thin eighteen-year-old weeps and begs, he's a parent; he's already told Jim, in no uncertain terms, that there is a pocketknife in his boot and he wants it used the instant he thinks the baby is in danger. That was almost two hours ago.

The contraction slows, and Pavel's body – already so over-burdened from months of a pregnancy that needed the care of Scotty and the expertise of Spock and the sheer will of Bones to make it safely past five months – goes slack.

"Pavel?" Jim asks, and when there is no response he scuttles as quickly as he can up to the head of their cave, banging his knees as he goes. He grabs Pavel's hand and squeezes urgently. Long, graceful fingers that used to play piano and pull Scotty's hair and dance over the helm are caked with blood and dirt, balled into tight fists. Jim wonders for one brief, shocking second whether he'd be left in this hole with a premature infant and a dead teenager if they didn't get through soon enough.

It sparks a memory – a dark hole in the wall, the sound of those last sucking breaths, the terror of hiding for hours, hearing the screams and shots in the streets, the sound of boots on bloody sidewalks – and he yanks himself abruptly back into the present, unwilling to let his mind leave him at a time like this. "Chekov?" Jim says more intently.

"Da." He pants, "I am here."

A rumble suddenly shakes the very ground they lie on – Jim instantly arches himself over the belly and torso of Chekov, trying hard not to crush them, and at the same time in a terror that something too big will fall, snap his spine, kill them all in one swift moment. He tries hard not to think of that as the merciful option.

Dust shifts from the ceiling as Pavel's body writhes under Jim's in agony, and he lets out a screech that perfectly echoes the sounds of rock sliding against one another above them. His swollen abdomen – not even large, for the beginning of the third trimester – bumps gently against Jim's stomach, and then falls away as the contraction ends. The boy is crying in that pained, dry, hacking way, a sound of utter exhaustion that says he can't do this much longer.

The shifting around them stops, at least for the moment. Jim eases himself off to the side, lying parallel to Chekov with his back poked by jagged outcroppings. For a moment he lets himself give in to his own exhaustion, letting his head droop and eyes close. Their breathing is loud in the confined space. Jim's is husky, deep, trying to suck some oxygen from all this cold damp; Chekov's is positively wheezing, shallow, fast and worrisome. Jim fumbles for his wrist and tries to take a pulse; but his fingers have gone numb from the earlier position, and he can't feel anything. This is helplessness, he thinks.

Jim makes a snap decision and fumbles for the canteen that had been on his belt not too long ago. "Drink, okay?" he insists, and uses his hastily wiped fingertips to find cracked lips, pour what's left of their water into the boy. Hand washing isn't the important part anymore, contrary to all Starfleet literature about preventing infection. That's all gone far out the window.

"Mory?" Pavel grips Jim's wrist loosely, and it takes him a moment to realize that must be the nickname Pavel has given Jim's Chief Engineer. It suits him – well, it suits Pavel's accent, because 'Monty' has always come out sounding weird and even 'Scotty' wouldn't take to a Russian pronunciation. How didn't he know that, before?

"He's on his way." Jim promises, the hollow sound of it closing in on him in the black. Scotty was, at last Jim knew, working on the transporter, trying to figure a way through the mountain that didn't risk scrambling them into atoms as they passed through the traces of dilithium.

"Want- need Mory…" Pavel lets out one sob, and in the darkness Jim could be hearing a child wishing for their mother to pick them up and make it all better. The hand on his wrist suddenly jerks and tightens, and Pavel keens again, this time grabbing his legs just behind the bent knees.

Jim bangs his head again this time, but it doesn't even register once he kneels in the gush of blood that has soaked the dirt below him. The scent hits him hard, and he bites back his nausea.

"Oh God." He says it reflexively, feeling the stuff soak into his uniform and hearing the boy's cries escalate. He feels tentatively for the opening, following the slick of blood upwards, and for the first time in two hours encounters resistance a few inches in.

"He's crowning, Pavel. Oh, shit, that was fast – okay, no, that's good, we're almost there, almost there-" Jim starts babbling and doesn't make any attempt to stop. Pavel is hissing something, maybe he's just breathing hard or maybe they're words, but it doesn't matter because Jim can feel the shift in the kid's body; they've hit the home stretch. This has to be it, or it has to be the end.

Pavel's fingers are digging into the back of his thighs, from how tightly his arms are shaking, Jim can tell; and he can feel the full-body contraction, coming in waves with hardly any break in between, and he can sense, from the way the sound echoes, how harsh Pavel's breathing is.

"C'mon, Pavel, c'mon, a bit more, you're so close-"

Something hits Jim in the cheek, narrowly missing his eye, and it's a moment of panic over a complete cave-in later that he recognizes it for Pavel's hand. He feels frantically around until he grabs on, and grabs on tight, despite the slipperiness of Pavel's own blood between their palms.

Pave is whispering something to himself again, and bearing down like Kirk hasn't felt before – there's a flash of recognition when he realizes the noise is a mantra of 'Mory, Mory, Mory-" and his bones ache with the strength Pavel is applying to them, and the boy screams once, raw and broken, and abruptly there is a head in Jim's lap, and then a slippery set of shoulders, and he can feel arms and legs and, with a sickening squish, placenta following after.

He says nothing, and just sits there, holding a still, warm body in his dirty, callused hands. Pavel gasps for air and reaches vainly downwards – his nails graze Jim's cheek again.

"Nyet." The boy chokes out, and flails once more. Jim carefully lifts the baby and runs his hands along every inch of skin, searching for what could possibly be wrong, so much is wrong already and this isn't how this goes, and he can feel the right number of fingers and toes, and a small, perfectly formed head, and soft sticky hair and a body that is still warm from the womb. Over them, dust is sifting downwards, and neither seems to care.

"Bozhe moi…nyet-" Pavel grasps in the dark, and Jim leans forward – if only to let him touch the baby, this oh-so-still child who has cost his father blood and pain, but will cost them so much more if he doesn't take a breath-

Jim feels Pavel begin to shake. In all his life he has never known this kind of sorrow, this kind of breaking agony that leaves him with unbearable physical pain. Pavel won't cry, God known the kid is already in shock, and Jim realizes he might have to bring Montgomery Scott two bodies at the end of this day, and deliver a message that may as well be a death sentence. Not even Enterprise will be able to keep Scotty going if Jim is the only one to walk out of here. If he leaves at all. Another flash of Tarsus – the body going cold, Jim's silent sobs, the smell of insulation and broken plaster dusting his shoulders- no, he's not there, he tells himself, and the stuff getting in his eyes isn't plaster.

It's dust, more dust is sifting down, and Jim honestly can't bring himself to do anything about it. He holds the little body, carefully as he can, and moves to place him on Pavel's chest, just to let him hold his son.

"He's- he's-" Jim tries to say something – but what? Beautiful, though we're blind in here, gone, though we'll sit with his body, yours, though he has to be buried? What does a captain say when there are no words for this kind of loss? How does he comfort a man who doesn't want his touch or his words?

He turns the baby over, and suddenly there's a movement and he nearly drops him in surprise.

Then a hacking, wet cough, and the most soaring and infuriated and relieving wail in the world goes up, and this child is moving in Jim's hands, moving as he lowers him to Pavel's chest, breathing and crying angrily against his sobbing father, who cannot stop shaking and doesn't even remember English at this point. The dust sifting down doesn't matter, Jim doesn't matter, and the fact that he's hemorrhaging doesn't mean a damn thing to Pavel Chekov when he has this living child in his arms.

It means something to Jim, though; it means he has to get the baby, and his father, out of here. The warmth of blood soaked into his uniform says there's little time to do that in. It's internal bleeding, and he's got nothing for that, but he can treat shock with warmth, and he holds both Pavel and his newborn close as dust sifts down and the teenager grows quieter and quieter.

"Pavel? Pavel, kid, please, stay with me here. Names. We're talking names." Jim says at length.

"Matvei Pavlovich." The boy mutters against the still-damp cheek of his baby.

"How's Scotty gonna like that one, huh?"

"He wants…" Pavel trails off.

"He wants what? What was his choice, Pavel? Pavel?"

There's no answer. The baby begin to wail, and Jim shakes Pavel's shoulder; nothing. "Pavel!" he shouts, echoing so loudly in the little tomb, and there's panic in his voice that only makes this half-hour old baby cry louder. He can feel himself slipping back to that hole in the wall again, and he's too frightened to stop the slide of memories – joints too stiff to shift away from her body, the plaster is coming down even harder, the sound of boots and gunshots is practically roaring in his ears, the wail of a toddler left in the street-

"Pavel! Please, God, Pavel, don't- don't go, please, don't leave me alone, can't go, Pavel, Hoshi, please-" he's screaming, almost incoherent, it might be for minutes or hours, and suddenly he realizes there's a voice beside his own there, and Christ, he really has gone insane, he sees a light and a face coming down to him-

"Oh God." He says, or maybe the face does.

"Dammit, Jim, move- get out of there, let me-" and familiar hands tug at him, and he scrambles out with their aid, coughing and blinking in the sudden artificial brightness, staggering against a wall of rough rock. There's a surge of movement around him – crewmen in red and yellow, he sees blurrily Sulu's grim face and a dirt-covered Security team, a stretcher and tools and Bones' blue shirt disappearing into the hole, before his chin is grabbed and someone is feeling over his skull.

"Captain, are you injured?" New hands, long warm fingers, on him; he hears shouting and movement and the infant's cries in the background, but the blue-and-black form looms larger, then he's up in the air and moving.

"Chekov- Hoshi-" he slurs, trying to close his eyes against the overwhelming lights.

"You have a significant laceration to the back of your head, Captain. You require medical attention. Doctor McCoy is with Ensign Chekov now." Spock's voice is calm as he carries Jim out towards the mouth of the cave. Something red rushes past him, too fast to see, but he knows exactly who it is when a sharp, broken wail goes up behind him. It's a sound of pure sorrow, intertwining with the baby's screams, and the weight of Jim's failure crashes down on him instantly.

"This- it's not how it goes, Spock." He says, feeling the shock begin to take his body, "'S not how this ends. It can't-"

Spock takes one more step and then Jim is outside, looking up at a strange orange moon and a sky full of stars. It's bright out here, and the air is faintly citrusy, with the faint tang of salt water somewhere in the distance. It's the sweetest breath Jim's taken in hours, and the most painful.

"I- Hoshi - he tried so hard, Spock. It can't end like this." Jim forces the words out over the tears beginning to cut through the dirt and blood on his cheeks.

"I know, Jim. It was not your fault." The Vulcan responds in the softest voice Jim's ever heard out of his second officer, the first time Spock's called him by his given name, and then he intones "Two to beam up."

Jim has enough time to glimpse the bright red blood soaking his hands, under the orange moonlight of an alien sky, before the world drops away.

Like I said, special hell. Special AU hell. However, there is a happier ending in Ch. 2...


	2. Happy Ending

Just a tag to the story, in case the ending was too morbid for ya.

He wakes up in Sickbay some indeterminate time later- early morning, by Enterprise's chronometer – and the lights are still down, the little curtained-off areas quiet without the bustle of daytime personnel.

"Mattie." Someone says quietly, and it takes Jim's fuzzy brain a moment to realize it's Scotty. The world comes rushing back to him in an instant; the cave, flashbacks, Pavel's screams, the blood – reflexively, Jim looks down at his hands, expecting to see or feel that awful slick of red, and is surprised when there's nothing but his own smooth skin.

"Matvei is a good name." a soft voice insists.

"Aye, but it'll get him nowt but trouble on a playground. Mattie's fine, darlin', for a nickname. Mattie Scott."

"Matvei Pavlovich Scott." The weak voice repeats, and Jim sits up so fast his biobed starts making all kinds of worried noises. Before a nurse can accost him, though, his bare feet hit the floor and he's stepping through the thin white curtain beside him.

"Captain!" They say at the same time, and the accents create an unintelligible dissonance, but he doesn't give a damn because there's Scott holding Chekov, who's cradling the baby and mid-way through stroking one of his tiny curls. Pavel's white-pale, and Jim can see the bulk of bandages and stabilizers under the boy's hospital gown, but his eyes are open and he's _alive_.

Jim's weak with relief, and sinks into the chair beside Pavel's bed smiling like an idiot and near to tears at the scene of this tiny, miraculous family.

"How- I thought, I mean, when-?"

Scotty seems to understand what Jim's asking, and nods. "Aye. We all saw so much blood – the Doc, he couldn't find a pulse, 'twas so weak – and when I saw Sulu's face, I thought the worst." He takes a long look at Chekov, as if reminding himself that it wasn't real, and goes on, "The surgery took a good seven hours. But McCoy pulled it off, the miracle worker."

"I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker." A sleepy voice grumbles, and the doctor pokes his head around the curtain, "Jim, get back in bed. You've got a crack in that thick head of yours, damn fool."

"Is that how you talk to the Captain?" Jim shoots back.

"It's how I talk to morons who don't give their own skull a chance to heal." Bones says with good-natured grumbling, and even as he shoves Jim back towards his bed he can tell the Doctor is riding the same wave of relief. "And you, Scott, give that boy a rest-"

"Aye aye, sir." Scotty drops a gentle kiss to Pavel's forehead, and rises carefully from the bed, tucking blankets around him. "Back to sleep wi' you, darlin'. We'll be here later today, alright?"

"Da, Mory." Pavel replies, and kisses his son with a soft sigh of contentment, and Scotty with a note of longing. The two of them stare into each other's faces for a long moment before they separate. Jim realizes, in a distracted flash, that there are exactly eighteen years between Scott and Chekov, and the same distance between Pavel and Matvei; something circular about it pleases him, or at least makes him want to tell Spock about the observation.

Scotty takes the baby carefully, handling Matvei even more gently than Jim's seen him hold engine components and delicate circuits, and heads out with one last, grateful look at Pavel. The boy's already beginning to drift off, but he manages a soft "_Spasiba_, Captain. For everything." that Jim receives with a silent nod.

McCoy herds Jim back around the curtain and up onto the biobed, which picks up recording his vitals. The doctor inspects one of the read-outs intently, checking it against some earlier figure.

"What's the damage report, Bones?" Jim asks. He can feel the place where his head was gashed; the skin on it is tender and sensitive, surely regenerated.

"Hairline fracture, but you were developing a hematoma. M'Benga did a good job. Don't mess up his work with a lot of jumping around." McCoy says gruffly.

"And Chekov?" Jim asks, more hesitantly. Even in the dim light, he can see Bones' wince.

"It was bad. I've never seen a birth go that…" he trails off, caught in the memory of what must've been a pretty horrific surgery. "The kid was all ripped up. He was small to begin with, and these pregnancies are always risky if you don't get the hormones finished right. Chekov'll be alright, but he's never going to have more children. I don't want him on any away missions, either, for the next few months. Maybe longer. That was a damn close call."

"But the baby's healthy?"

Bones adjusts something on the panel above Jim's head, and nods with a smile blooming on his face. "On the small side, but fine. Looks a lot like Chekov, with Scott's freckles. You did a good job, Jim."

"I thought – at first, he wouldn't breathe, and I about lost it, Bones." He admits in a voice so small it's almost non-existent.

The doctor goes quiet, fiddles a bit more with the controls on the biobed, and eventually he perches on the side of Jim's bed. "You did, a bit, kiddo. As we were clearing off that layer of rock- you were screaming your head off, Jim. I think most people assumed you were trying to make us hear where you were."

"I was- I remembered something. It was like before." Jim has to force the word out, "Tarsus. I was hiding, and she – she'd been hit a while ago, and it happened really fast, but I couldn't move from inside the wall…"

"Hoshi Sato." Bones says softly. When Jim nods, he adds, "You said something to Spock. He checked the name."

"She- she knew my mom, from way back. Taught me Japanese. We hid together, for a while."

Bones is silent for a long time, and just as Jim begins to drift towards sleep he whispers, "I'm sorry, kid. Must've been hell in there."

"Was more worried about Chekov. Couldn't waste time on remembering." He mumbles, fighting to keep his eyes open.

"I know. You did the right things, though, Jim. Got 'em both home safe."

"Yeah?" Jim asks wearily and a little searchingly, feeling himself sliding deeper into a bone-weary sleep.

"Yeah, you did. Just fine." Bones murmurs, and it's enough to let Jim's eyes drop closed, let himself sink into rest, with the soft sound of Pavel's even breathing a few feet away and a warm hand on his forehead.


End file.
